by Richard Rohr
Jesus is never upset at sinners (check it out!); he is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners! Jesus was fully at home with this tragic sense of life. He lived and rose inside it. I am now personally convinced that Jesus' ability to find a higher order inside constant disorder is the very heart of his message—and why true Gospel, as rare as it might be, still heals and renews all that it touches.
Jesus found and named the unified field beneath all the contradictions, which Annie Dillard spoke of in the epigraph above. If we do not find that unified field, “our complex and inexplicable caring for each other,” or what Buddhists call the Great Compassion, there is no healing to life's inconsistencies and contradictions. Religion is always about getting you back and down into the unified field, where you started anyway.
The Great Turnaround
In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemption experience itself. Much of organized religion, however, tends to be peopled by folks who have a mania for some ideal order, which is never true, so they are seldom happy or content. It makes you anal retentive after a while, to use Freud's rude phrase, because you can never be happy with life as it is, which is always filled with handicapped people, mentally unstable people, people of “other” and “false” religions, irritable people, gay people, and people of totally different customs and traditions. Not to speak of wild nature, which we have not loved very well up to now. Organized religion has not been known for its inclusiveness or for being very comfortable with diversity. Yet pluriformity, multiplicity, and diversity is the only world there is! It is rather amazing that we can miss, deny, or ignore what is in plain sight everywhere.
Sin and salvation are correlative terms. Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor. That is how transformative divine love is. If this is not the pattern, what hope is there for 99.9 percent of the world? We eventually discover that the same passion which leads us away from God can also lead us back to God and to our true selves. That is one reason I have valued and taught the Enneagram for almost forty years now.2 Like few other spiritual tools, it illustrates this transformative truth. Once you see that your “sin” and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial. The only people who do not believe that the Enneagram is true are those who do not understand it or have never used it well.
God seems to be about “turning” our loves around (in Greek, meta-noia), and using them toward the Great Love that is their true object. All lesser loves are training wheels, which are good in themselves, but still training wheels. Many of the healing stories in the New Testament are rather clear illustrations of this message and pattern. Jesus says this specifically of “the woman who was a sinner”: “Her sins, her many sins, must have been forgiven her, or she could not have shown such great love” (Luke 7:47). It seems that her false attempts at love became the school and stepping-stones to “such great love.”
We clergy have gotten ourselves into the job of “sin management” instead of sin transformation. “If you are not perfect, then you are doing something wrong,” we have taught people. We have blamed the victim, or have had little pity for victims, while daring to worship a victim image of God. Our mistakes are something to be pitied and healed much more than hated, denied, or perfectly avoided. I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you. Otherwise, it will only return in new forms, as Jesus says of the “unclean spirit” that returns to the house all “swept and tidied” (Luke 11:24–26); then he rightly and courageously says that “the last state of the house will be worse than the first.”
One could say that the tragedy, the “goat stories” of racism, slavery, sexism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the two World Wars, all of which emerged in and were tolerated by Christian Europe, are a stunning manifestation of our disillusionment and disgust with ourselves and one another, when we could not make the world right and perfectly ordered, as we were told it should be. We could not love the imperfection within ourselves or the natural world, so how could we possibly build any bridges toward Jews, Muslims, people of color, women, sinners, or even other Christians? None of them fit into the “order” we had predecided on. We had to kill, force, imprison, torture, and enslave as we pursued our colonization of the rest of the world, along with the planet itself. We did not carry the cross, the tragic sense of life, but we became expert instead at imposing tragedies on others. Forgive my anger, but we must say it.
Philosophers and social engineers have promised us various utopias, with no room for error, but the Jewish Scriptures, which are full of anecdotes of destiny, failure, sin, and grace, offer almost no self-evident philosophical or theological conclusions that are always true.3 The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, are an amalgam of at least four different sources and theologies (Yahwistic, Eloistic, Deuteronomic, and Priestly). We even have four, often conflicting versions of the life of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There is not one clear theology of God, Jesus, or history presented, despite our attempt to pretend there is. The only consistent pattern I can find is that all the books of the Bible seem to agree that somehow God is with us and we are not alone. God and Jesus' only job description is one of constant renewal of bad deals.
The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. It is just ultimate and humiliating realism, which for some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything. Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone, the price we must pay to keep the human heart from closing down and to keep the soul open for something more.
Chapter 5
Stumbling over the Stumbling Stone
God is both sanctuary and stumbling stone, Yahweh is a rock that brings Israel down, the Lord is a trap and snare for the people.
—ISAIAH 8:14
We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.
—W. H. AUDEN
Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it; or to state it in our language here, you will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey. I wish I could say this was not true, but it is darn near absolute in the spiritual literature of the world.
There is no practical or compelling reason to leave one's present comfort zone in life. Why should you or would you? Frankly, none of us do unless and until we have to. The invitation probably has to be unexpected and unsought. If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise. Just bogus “self-improvement” on our own terms.
Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise. What an eni
gma! Self-help courses of any type, including this one if it is one, will help you only if they teach you to pay attention to life itself. “God comes to you disguised as your life,” as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.
So we must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. And that does not mean reading about falling, as you are doing here. We must actually be out of the driver's seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. This kind of falling is what I mean by necessary suffering, which I will try to describe in the next chapter. It is well dramatized by Paul's fall on the Damascus Road, where he hears the voice “Why are you hurting yourself by kicking against the goad?” (Acts 26:14). The goad or cattle prod is the symbol of both the encouragement forward and our needless resistance to it, which only wounds us further.
It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again—but now on a new level. Three of the parables of Jesus are about losing something, searching for it anew with some effort, finding it, and in each case throwing a big party afterwards. A sheep, a coin, a son are all lost and found in Luke 15, followed by the kind of inner celebration that comes with any new “realization” (when something has become real for you). Almost every one of Odysseus's encounters coming home from Troy are losses of some type—his men, his control, his power, his time, his memory, his fame, the boat itself. Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern, I am sorry to report. Yet they all lead toward home.
In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the Higher Power. Jesus calls this Ultimate Source the “living water” at the bottom of the well, to the woman who keeps filling and refilling her own little bucket (John 4:10–14).
There must be, and, if we are honest, there always will be at least one situation in our lives that we cannot fix, control, explain, change, or even understand. For Jesus and for his followers, the crucifixion became the dramatic symbol of that necessary and absurd stumbling stone. Yet we have no positive theology of such necessary suffering, for the most part. Many Christians even made the cross into a mechanical “substitutionary atonement theory” to fit into their quid pro quo worldview, instead of suffering its inherent tragedy, as Jesus did himself. They still want some kind of order and reason, instead of cosmic significance and soulful seeing.1
We, like the ox and St. Paul, largely still “kick against the goad,” instead of listening to and learning from the goads of everyday life. Christians who read such passages were still not able to see that the goads were somehow necessary or even good. Suffering does not solve any problem mechanically as much as it reveals the constant problem that we are to ourselves, and opens up new spaces within us for learning and loving. Here Buddhism was much more observant than Christianity, which made even the suffering of Jesus into God's attempt to solve some cosmic problem—which God had largely created to begin with! The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem—our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the “scene of our crime.”
In the tale of Odysseus and in other stories from world mythology, the theme of loss and humiliation was constant and unrelenting, variously presented as the dragon, the sea monster, Scylla and Charybdis, an imprisonment, plague or illness, a falling into hell, the sirens, a storm, darkness, a shipwreck, the lotus eaters, the state of fatherlessness or orphanhood, homelessness, being stranded on an island, blindness, and often the powerless state of poverty and penury.
Sometimes it seems that half of the fairy tales of the world are some form of Cinderella, ugly duckling, or poor boy story, telling of the little person who has no power or possessions who ends up being king or queen, prince or princess. We write it off as wishful dreaming, when it is actually the foundational pattern of disguise or amnesia, loss, and recovery. Every Beauty is sleeping, it seems, before it can meet its Prince. The duckling must be “ugly,” or there will be no story. The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it. Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection. It is written in our hardwiring, but can only be heard at the soul level. It will usually be resisted and opposed at the ego level.
My own spiritual father, Francis of Assisi, says in his Testament that when he kissed the leper, “What before had been nauseating to me became sweetness and life.” He marks that moment as the moment of his conversion and the moment when he “left the world.” The old game could not, would not work anymore. That seems to have been the defining moment when he tasted his own insufficiency, and started drawing from a different and larger source—and found it sufficient—apparently even more than sufficient. It made him into the classic Christian saint. The leper was his goad, and he learned not to kick against it, but actually to kiss it. That is the pattern, just as you will sometimes hear from recovering addicts who end up thanking God for their former drinking, gambling, or violence. They invariably say that it was a huge price to pay, but nothing less would have broken down their false self and opened them to love.
I can only think of the many men and women I met during my fourteen years as a jail chaplain here in New Mexico. No one taught them the necessary impulse control and delay of gratification, which is the job of a good parent. With poor identity, weak boundaries, or little inherent sense of their dignity, they allowed themselves to be destroyed—and to destroy others—by drugs, promiscuity, addictive relationships, alcohol, violence, or abuse. Then the enforced and cruel order of the jail was supposed to serve as their reparenting course, but now the lesson was so much harder to learn because of all the inner scarring and resentments toward all authority and toward themselves.
If you do not do the task of the first half of life well, you have almost no ability to rise up from the stumbling stone. You just stay down and defeated, or you waste your time kicking against the goad. There has been nothing to defeat your “infantile grandiosity,” as Dr. Robert Moore wisely calls it.2 In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward—and by ourselves. It works for so few, and it cannot serve us well in the long run—because it is not true. It is an inherently win-lose game, and more and more people find themselves on the losing side. If the Gospel is indeed gospel (“good news”), then it has to be win-win, and a giant victory for both God and us.
Almost all of us end up being casualties of this constantly recurring Greek hubris. Some even appear to make it to the “top,” but there is usually little recognition of the many shoulders they stood on to move there, the many gratuitous circumstances that made it possible for them to arrive there, and sometimes the necks they have stood on to stay there. Some who get to the top have the savvy to recognize that there is nothing up there that lasts or satisfies. Far too many just stay at the bottom of their own lives and try to overcompensate in all kinds of futile and self-defeating ways.
I am sure many slaveholders in the South were “self-made men” and perhaps never in their entire lives had to face a situation where they did not “succeed.” Such a refusal to fall kept them from awareness, empathy, and even basic human compassion. The price they paid for such succeeding was an inability to allow, join, or enjoy “the general dance.” They “gained the whole world, but lost their soul,” as Jesus put it. They did their survival dance, but never got to the sacred dance, which by necessity includes everybody else. If it is a sacred dance, it is always the general dance too.
Chapter 6
Necessary Suffering
Anyone who wants to save his life, must lose it. Anyone who loses her life will find it. What g
ain is there if you win the whole world and lose your very self? What can you offer in exchange for your one life?
—MATTHEW 16:25–26
Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me.
—MATTHEW 14:37–39
Carl Jung said that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the “legitimate suffering” that comes from being human. In fact, he said neurotic behavior is usually the result of refusing that legitimate suffering! Ironically, this refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run. It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message in male initiation rites is “life is hard.” We really are our own worst enemy when we deny this.
To explain why I begin this chapter on necessary suffering with two hard-hitting quotes from Jesus of Nazareth, let me explain a bit about myself. I must start with my birth relationship with Catholic Christianity (I presume you know that I have been a priest for forty years, and a Franciscan for almost fifty), because in many ways it has been the church that has taught me—in ways that it did not plan—the message of necessary suffering. It taught me by itself being a bearer of the verbal message, then a holding tank, and finally a living crucible of necessary (and sometimes unnecessary!) suffering.
A crucible, as you know, is a vessel that holds molten metal in one place long enough to be purified and clarified. Church membership requirements, church doctrine, and church morality force almost all issues to an inner boiling point, where you are forced to face important issues at a much deeper level to survive as a Catholic or a Christian, or even as a human. I think this is probably true of any religious community, if it is doing its job. Before the truth “sets you free,” it tends to make you miserable.
